#swears

I don't know where it came from, but several years ago this idea popped into my head unbidden, and for some reason it tickles me. I don't know if it's funny, but I like it and I made it into a zine, I hope you enjoy it.

It lays out really nicely as 3-up spreads on A4 paper, so you can print, staple and fold it, then cut it into 3 zines. It made it really easy to print up 20 of them to trade at this art social thing I went to

micron, rotring and sharpie on printer paper, coloured and screentoned digitally, 2024

I am very entertained by the french dub's liberal use of swears, it's been fun and never cease to amaze me that they can just SAY that

soooo.

I had an idea, I wrote it. I saved it to drafts. I went doom scrolling. And gave me another idea. Here it is.

This is the prompt that I read/saw.

Jason: so. Are we doing this dog button thing? Cus I think it'd be a great idea. I mean the little guy is obviously smart... *looks at LBJ chewing a bottle cap and occasional smacking it* I mean... He is to share extent. But I men he's a baby so...

Damian: Todd is right father. We should get these buttons, and if they work he can communicate with us.

Bruce: *heavy sigh* okay, yeah. Let's get the button

Dick, Steph, Duke and Tim: WOOHOO

Cass: *fist bumps the air*

Damian and Jasson: *nodding approvingly*

----

Later that week-

Bruce: okay, so. Each of you get at least 10 buttons, work together and record whatever you deem necessary, but make sure there are no duplicates. Any questions?

Jason: *raises hand*

Bruce: *sigh* yes Jason?

Jason: can I use your car?

Bruce: ... Can I ask why?

Jason: I'm going to visit Roy, and my bike doesn't have a license plate, and other cities aren't as corrupt or lax as gothams so I'd get pulled over. Plus it's custom.

Bruce: *sighs feeling more gray hairs grow* okay. Yeah. I'll be in my office if you need me.

-

Oh, that's a funny story. I remember how we discussed the topic of Teyvat swearing in Telegram, and it seemed to me that I was making a post here (because I remember exactly how I suffered with the authentic translation of some phrases), and I found it!

So, a few more thoughts from the Telegram people) The translation is crooked, but tit is what it is

About swearing. They can be associated with the elements, since in Teyvat they worship not only Archons, but also elements, for example: lightning blast you, lets the wind blows you away, lets mushrooms sprout from you, so that the winds turn away from you (wind is the personification of freedom, so this is a wish to go to prison. Among sailors, this may be a desire to lose a fair wind), a rock may tear you apart, you don't have a drop of dendro (you don't have brains), don't you even have a pyro in your house (a desire to become so poor that not even a light in the house was not enough food. And this is despite the fact that in teiwat this very fire can be obtained in a thousand and one ways). I also think they should be related to the nations and especially the Snezhnaya and their Fatui. "You are not from Mondstadt to drink like that", "Even the chief drunkard of Mond would not drink this stuff", "You are my father and not Barbatos, do not leave the house", "This is not a house but a branch of Monstadt", "Do not be a liyueman" (this is how a greedy person is called), "Yes you are a pure-blooded inazuman" (they say sarcastically, so they say about those who are mired in the past and do not want to change), "Can you already be called a mushroom man?"(a reference to griboswins and moldworms, who are considered stupid), "Have you seen a lot of dreams?"(dreams in Sumeru are considered a sign of childhood, plus they are quite chaotic. So it could be a phrase that calls you a kid (meaning stupid) and that your ideas are crazy. Plus we have the same phrase: Have you eaten too much henbane? (Have you gone nuts?)), "Did you see aranaras?"(Are you crazy?), "I didn't know you were from Sumeru"(you're a buzzkill), "I will not sing an Ode for you" (the ode of resurrection, the one that returns from the Night Realm, in fact it is a fully feasible but non-punitive action and at the same time it is literally a wish for death), "Let Saurian turn away from you", "Fatuus" (there are a lot of meanings at once. And a scoundrel, and a bastard, and a pest, and a creature), "Hey, Snezhnevich" (in fact, the same Fatuus, plus you can add scumbag), "This is not Snezhnaya for you" (the abode of thieves and criminals, where the right of the strong reigns), "So that your fur coat leaks" (it's cold in Snezhnaya), "Slippery ice for you" (I don't know as for you, and for me it's the worst), "Deep snow for you".

Kinda like that. I'll be glad to read your options, because maybe I'll recognize the English slang by eye, but I definitely won't remember it myself.

from what we've seen, swearing is done in another language (I believe its Blest?) things like /muti/ or /kak/. but there are options for the mc to use English swears. Is mc swearing in English or is mc swearing in Blest, and its just written in English for readers to understand? Id have to run through again, but i dont remember seeing anyone swearing in English (except maybe the scene at the tavern after lockwood?)

anyways. ive played through this game at least 7 times. thanks for ruining my life (said with great love and affection)

Hi, the general language that all of the characters are speaking is called Common! And all of the characters use plenty of regular English curses too--I just did a search for the word "fuck" and it came back with 198 instances lol, mostly from the other characters!

Likewise, MC can also curse with the 'non-English' swears:

Generally, it's accepted that the language spoken in the Continent is really a mix of a bunch of different languages (just like English and any real-life language that has a lot of foreign loan words and portmanteaus). You'll notice it happening more commonly in characters from big cities, where there's a lot of intermingling of different races, languages, regional dialects, and accents. The canon is that places like Haven (or Conte, where Chase is from) blend together a lot of contemporary language and older terms that either first stemmed from other languages (like Elvish, which is generally thought to be the first mother language or root language in Blest) or from older iterations of Common itself--Old Common, if you will--which has some untranslatable terms, slang, wanderworts, or calques like panton-keras (a specific kind of street-fighter basically only found in Haven). It's sort of like how we unthinkingly use words from Old English that were invented in that time period and then passed into the common dialect: "bliss" from the Proto-West Germanic blīþisi, or "shit," which you can trace back to Proto-Indo-European "skeydi"--to split or divide from something--or "buttock," which originally comes from an Old English term meaning the end of a piece of land; or words that we just straight up adopted from other languages, like "café" (French) or "jungle" (Hindi-Urdu) or "piano" (Italian) or "canyon" (Spanish). If we want to get briefly historically nerdy, English history also impacts English language in fascinating ways: at one point, Latin, Old French, and Anglo-Norman French were the languages spoken by the church and the Norman conquerers who came to England in the conquest of 1066, while Old English (itself a Germanic language that had replaced the languages of Roman Britain) was spoken by the peasants, but became influenced by so many Old French and Latin words that it sort of morphed into its own thing, later turning into Middle English. I try to apply that kind of historical and cultural variety to Blest and its languages, so you see a lot of commingling where some words are pretty straightforward, and others sound "foreign" to us, but not to the people speaking them. Saying "muti" to the characters is as commonplace as saying "bastard"; they just don't think twice about its etymology, just like we don't when we're saying the word "café." I hope that makes some kind of sense??

I try to further communicate these ideas in all the ways the characters talk: like I mentioned, the ones from urban environments tend to use a lot of slang, and often Haven-specific slang (at least in Trouble's case); whereas characters from smaller places that weren't melting pots tend not to blend their dialects as much and have more 'linguistically pure' and often formal speech (Lavinet, Riel, Blade). It's the same with their religiously-slanted swears: Trouble almost exclusively uses One-God curses like "God's teeth" or "God's blood" or what have you--but also throws in other phrases like "the whores of Tapyt" because he just came from an environment that had a lot of colorful language used by a diverse array of people--whereas characters from a Diminished environment tend to only swear "by the gods" (Red, Briony, Ayla, Halek). Chase, not really believing in any gods at all, uses both interchangeably because it doesn't matter to him, lol. Devout characters like Shery or Tallys never reference them in an irreverent way at all. And sometimes Ayla, being from Jalis, uses terms and swears that none of the other characters even know, but the MC learns and comes to understand the more she sticks around:

Idk, it's a bit complicated to talk about, but fun for me, lol!

*The walls and floors are grimy and covered in long dried blood.*

*He hears angry yelling.*

*... one of the voices is... horribly familiar.*

"AND WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?!" *Someone who sounds like Beef snaps.*